A branch of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has sued the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), a federal organization that provides funding to many major arts centers across the US.

In a lawsuit filed on Thursday, the ACLU’s Rhode Island offshoot filed a suit on behalf of several theaters, claiming that the NEA’s new policy that applicants not “promote gender ideology” will limit what kinds of works can be shown. The NEA adopted that policy was adopted after an executive order issued in January by President Donald Trump.

Filed in the United States District Court for the District of Rhode Island, the complaint says that the executive order was an “unlawful and unconstitutional exercise of executive power that has sowed chaos in the funding of arts projects across the United States.”

Although the lawsuit refers mostly to theatrical productions, its allegations could also impact art exhibitions featuring work by nonbinary and transgender artists. Most major art institutions in the US, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Museum of Modern Art, receive NEA funding in varying amounts.

The suit mentions several theatrical productions that the ACLU claims are being impacted by the “gender ideology” executive order.

Archaeologists have discovered a collection of jewelry dating back to the early 26th Dynasty during excavation work in the northwestern part of the Karnak Temple in Luxor, Egypt.

The Temple of Karnak is one of Egypt’s most significant complexes, boasting as many as 20 temples and chapels that have provided great insight into ancient Egyptian religious practices. While there have been a number of incredible artifacts found, the site is an important part of the country’s cultural history as the believed spot where creation began, as well as the point of interaction between the god Amun-Ra and the ancient Egyptians.

Massive mudbrick structures from the same era in the region are thought to have been used as production or storage facilities for the Temple of Karnak and other religious sites.

Work at the site was conducted by the joint Egyptian-French archaeological mission of the Egyptian-French Centre for the Study of Karnak Temples in collaboration with the Supreme Council of Antiquities and the French National Centre for Scientific Research.

“It is a very important discovery because it provides a clearer understanding of the historical development of the Karnak Temples during the first millennium BCE,” Mohamed Ismail Khaled, Secretary-General of the SCA, told Ahram Online.

Juan Hamilton, an artist, caretaker, and protégé of renowned painter Georgia O’Keeffe and the sole beneficiary of her will, died in his Santa Fe, New Mexico home on February 20 at 79 years old.

He died from complications related to a subdural hematoma, which occurred several years ago, according to his wife Anna Marie Hamilton.

Born John Bruce Hamilton on December 22, 1945, in Dallas, Texas, he grew up in Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela, the child of parents Alan and Claire (Kitzmiller) Hamilton, who served as Presbyterian missionaries. During this time, he adopted the name Juan and began learning how to work with clay from local potters.

Hamilton lived between Manhattan’s Upper West Side and Glen Rock, New Jersey in high school, and earned a bachelor’s degree in studio art from Hastings College in Nebraska, and later studied sculpture at Claremont Graduate University in California.

At 27, Hamilton was a divorced potter and handyman at the sprawling Ghost Ranch property, owned by the Presbyterian Church, where 85-year-old O’Keeffe resided. After knocking on the door and asking for odd jobs, she had him pack a shipping crate—and thus began a decade-long, scandalous relationship.

San Francisco’s California College of the Arts (CCA) has secured short-term financial stability through a $45 million fundraising campaign, alleviating an urgent budget deficit that had prompted fears of layoffs and a potential merger.

The campaign’s success hinged on a matching gift from the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation, which doubled the $22.5 million raised by over 50 donors, including trustees, former board members, and alumni. Jen-Hsun “Jensen” Huang, Nvidia’s cofounder and CEO, structured his contribution to encourage broader support.

CCA’s financial struggles emerged after a one-third drop in enrollment since 2019, contributing to a $20 million budget gap. In response, the institution cut 23 jobs—10 percent of its staff—and eliminated open positions totaling an additional 4.5 percent of staff roles. This turbulence coincided with the completion of a $123 million campus expansion, designed by Studio Gang, which added 82,300 square feet of studios, classrooms, and exhibition space.

Adding to CCA’s woes, the school recently settled a lawsuit with former faculty member J.D. Beltran, who alleged wrongful termination after exposing financial mismanagement. Among her claims was the disappearance of nearly $180,000 in earmarked funds for the Center for Art and Public Life.

Despite the school’s proximity to Silicon Valley, CCA’s board has limited tech representation, with just two members from the sector. The board is led by Lorna Meyer Calas of Merrill Lynch and Calvin B. Wheeler of Kaiser Permanente. The institution remains highly dependent on tuition and housing revenue, which account for 85 percent of its $75 million operating budget. Its $40 million endowment generates just $2 million annually. Enrollment stood at 1,400 in fall 2023 and is projected to drop to 1,250 this year.

If you’ve ever wanted to own a piece of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, now is your chance!

In an effort to raise funds to support France’s endangered religious landmarks and heritage sites, the medieval Catholic cathedral is raffling off around 50 stones from the iconic building. The stones, which were too badly damaged in the fire to reuse, weigh roughly 800 grams each and have been engraved with the silhouette of the iconic structure’s main façade.

To enter, you must be over the age of 18 and donate at least €40 ($43) by April 4 through a website set up by the Fondation du Patrimoine (Heritage Foundation). Winners will be selected by April 15—the day the fire tore through the cathedral in 2019—and are prohibited from selling, gifting, or trading the stones.

The Fondation du Patrimoine has already raised €228 million ($247 million) from nearly 236,000 donors out of the total €840 million ($912 million) raised to help restore Notre Dame. Established in 1996, the foundation supports the preservation of France’s religious heritage. Around 5,000 religious sites out of 50,000 identified across the country are in need of critical repair.

Though Notre Dame was ravaged by fire in 2019, it reopened last December. The restoration was a tremendous project: more than 2,000 artisans were involved; building materials included a felled oak tree that once stood 88 feet tall. 14,000 square feet of stone was replaced, 8,000 organ pipes were cleaned, and 1,500 solid oak pews were hewed and installed. The cathedral was also rigorously cleaned as part of the restoration. 

At times, it can feel like auction house specialists are part of a cult whose mantra is, ““High-quality, well-priced, fresh-to-market artworks will always sell.”

On Wednesday, in London, Christie’s Tessa Lord was the latest to adopt the cliché after the auction house’s 20th/21st Century evening sale generated a respectable £82.1 million, on a high estimate of £93 million. Immediately following, Christie’s held its annual “The Art of the Surreal” sale, which smashed the high estimate of £38.98 million, generating over £48 million. That brought the night’s total to £130.1 million

“One of the defining characteristics of [mid-season auctions] is that collectors will always respond well to fresh-to-the-market material that is well priced and high quality,” Lord, the house’s head of post-war and contemporary art in London, told ARTnews.

In this case, Lord’s assessment was appropriate. 61 percent of the sale’s 51 lots had never been sold at auction before. (At Sotheby’s equivalent sale Tuesday, over half of the lots also had never hit the block before.) 94 percent of works sold by lot, and 96 percent by value. Four lots were withdrawn ahead of the sale, and three were bought in.

(All prices mentioned include buyer’s premium and other fees unless otherwise mentioned.)

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The Headlines

ACLU SUES NEA OVER GENDER CLAUSE. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has sued the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), claiming that its new policy requiring that its funding applicants do not “promote gender ideology” will limit what kinds of works can be shown, reports Alex Greenberger for ARTnews. On Thursday, the ACLU’s Rhode Island offshoot filed a lawsuit on behalf of several theaters, which said that the policy adopted after President Donald Trump’s January executive order was an “unlawful and unconstitutional exercise of executive power that has sowed chaos in the funding of arts projects across the United States.” While the lawsuit mostly refers to theatrical productions, as we learned in yesterday’s Breakfast Newsletter, any person or institution seeking funding for arts via the NEA is affected.

SF MUSEUMS FACE PAINFUL BUDGET CUTS. Museums in San Francisco are getting hit hard by the city’s budget cuts and may have to reduce opening hours and cut jobs, reports The San Francisco Chronicle. Faced with a financial crisis and the city’s 15 percent reduction in general fund allocations, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), which oversees the de Young Museum and the Legion of Honor, proposed a host of cost-cutting measures in a plan submitted nearly two weeks ago to the mayor’s office for consideration. It outlines the cost-cutting benefits of slashing nearly a quarter of its city-funded workers, 23 positions out of 99, which mostly affects security jobs, while also impacting other human resources and museum operating jobs. Notably, it calculates the savings from closing the de Young and Legion of Honor museums on Tuesdays, in addition to the current Monday closure. However, shuttering on Tuesdays could also mean a drop in annual visitors, tourism, and economic growth, warns the FAMSF. “It is our understanding that the mayor’s office does not want to see a reduction of operating hours at the de Young and Legion of Honor, and we are working closely with the mayor’s budget office to analyze the proposal and look for other cost reduction opportunities,” said Helena Nordstrom, director of communications for FAMSF. Other San Francisco museums will be directly impacted by the budget cuts, including the Asian Art Museum, which is bracing to lose 13 security positions, despite warning, “it would be unsafe to operate the museum with this level of security coverage.”

The Digest

Researchers at English Heritage believe they have identified the only portrait of Lady Jane Grey made while she was alive, before her infamous 1554 execution. Known as the “nine-day queen,” she ruled over England for just that amount of time in 1553. Now, “compelling evidence,” including tree-ring dating and markings on the painted panel, which was apparently altered over the years, means, “it is possible that we are looking at the shadows of a once more royal portrait of Lady Jane Gray, toned down into subdued, Protestant martyrdom after her death,” said Rachel Turnbull, English Heritage’s senior collections conservator. [The Guardian]

Architect Ricardo Scofidio, who designed New York City’s High Line and The Shed, among many high-profile cultural structures in New York and abroad, has died at the age of 89. He led studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro with his partner Elizabeth Diller, and architect Charles Renfro. [Dezeen]

Ricardo Scofidio, an architect who helped reshape the museum landscape in the US, died on Thursday at 89. His death was announced by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the firm he founded with his wife Elizabeth Diller in 1997.

Working alongside Diller and firm partner Charles Renfro, Scofidio worked on many US museum projects, from the Museum of Modern Art’s 2019 expansion to a building for the Broad, the Los Angeles private museum of collectors Eli and Edythe Broad.

The firm’s various projects included any number of projects that were not museums: Lincoln Center, redesigned with new outdoor spaces at a cost of $1 billion; the High Line, the railroad viaduct–turned–park that runs through New York’s Chelsea neighborhood; the Blur, a pavilion situated in a Swiss lake; the Brasserie, a restaurant in the Seagram Building. But it is Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s museums that have had some of the greatest impact. (Though Scofidio was not the principal designer of all of them, he continued to play an active role in nearly all of them.)

The Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, the first US museum designed by Scofidio’s firm, offered a view of what the group would offer in future projects. Opened in 2006, the museum was, at the time, the first to be built in Boston in a century. It towers over the harbor nearby, with a hulking cantilevered form that juts out toward the water.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s ICA Boston is not without its quirks. Much of the art is confined to the building’s expansive fourth floor, leaving many portions of this sizable museum inaccessible to the public, and the lobby was labeled “an awkward leftover space” upon the building’s debut. But, even despite it all, the ICA Boston nailed down an aesthetic that Scofidio and his partners would popularize in the years to come: sleek but not too sleek, with heavy, minimalist forms that do not feel austere.

In a cramped basement space in New York’s SculptureCenter in early February, ventriloquist Sophia Becker adjusted the metal legs of a doll with long black hair, a single guarache made from metal, and an underwear-like piece made from medical materials that looks oddly fashionable.  “Oh god that feels good,” the doll chirped in a girlish voice, before complaining that she’s stiff from a lack of play. “The lookers come but they don’t touch. I wish they would touch!”

Becker was on hand for a one-night-only performance activating the exhibition, “Ideal Space for Music,” by Mexico-based artist-duo Hanya Beliá and Matias Armendaris, better known as ASMA. Becker puppetted the doll as she delivered a monologue about her life as an art piece, sitting in a museum. The room was packed, with an overflow audience watching a livestream on the floor above. Becker guided the audience into another room where another doll waited for her chance to come alive, this time to sing a song. The ventriloquy was followed by a musical performance by the interdisciplinary artist and DJ Esra Canoğullari, also known as 8ULENTINA, which included elements from foley sound production to accentuate the theatrical aspects of the exhibition.

The past year has been decisive for the duo, which is represented by Mexico City’s PEANA and House of Gaga, which has locations in Los Angeles and Guadalajara. Last October, they opened the SculptureCenter exhibition—their first institutional show—and then, just weeks later, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit opened its own show of their work, “Wander & Pursuit,” which closed in late February. They also have upcoming presentations at Art Basel in June with House of Gaga and at the Singapore Biennale in October.

For “Ideal Space for Music,” which runs until March 24, ASMA used SculptureCenter’s basement to reflect on the subconscious, a consistent theme over the course of their nine-year collaboration (which is perhaps unsurprising considering Armendaris’s mother’s career as an art therapist). The exhibition includes a series of metal spheres, a video work, soundscapes, ink paintings, and light fixtures made from found objects, transforming the cold concrete space into a bunker of the mind, a post-traumatic landscape of the collective psychology in which the dolls reside.

“It felt different making this work, we don’t usually use the body, the figure, to communicate our ideas about the unconscious,” Beliá told ARTnews after the performance ended. “We could feel it in the studio, when they came alive. All the parts were missing but the tension was there, and she could stand on her own. It was like magic.”

New York is a pretty sick town. Not in the “bro, that’s sick” way. Morbid, ill, macabre. The sickness has a lot to do with how disastrously emphasized the “New” in “New York” is with each passing generation. Forget what came before you. Just accept that things change. Enjoy the present while it lasts.

While eating at the new New York restaurant Manuela in SoHo, I had only one thought: Our present sucks. To be blunt: Manuela is quite nice. The food is obviously excellent; even better are the people who work there. It’s the streets around it that are decadent and depraved, and blandly so. Manuela, a spinoff of an LA restaurant by Hauser & Wirth’s hospitality arm Artfarm, can’t help but be caught in the crossfire.

Manuela is located at 130 Prince Street. Across the street, at 127 Prince Street, was Gordon Matta-Clark’s FOOD, the artist-run restaurant opened in 1971, designed to provide struggling artists with a dining-room and a kitchen to prepare low-cost meals and to develop a warm community. Struggling artists. Low-cost. Community. Now, in 2025, across the street, artsy types can get a good half-chicken for $42, a good steak tartare for $26, good cream biscuits with country ham for $16, and bone-in ribeye for two with green peppercorn sauce, $175. Cool. Everyone here looks well fed and taken care of. And 127 Prince is no longer operated by Matta-Clark, but by Marc Jacobs.

When I dined at Manuela with “the girls”—K.C., V.G., and J.S.—it was a chilly Galentine’s Day. At first, we went to the wrong door, one sealed-off, locked, and labeled “V.I.P.” Through the glass, we could see a private dining table seven meters long, studded with mosaic pieces by Rashid Johnson. Before we sipped our amaretto upon it, we were told the table was a tribute to the Central Park Five.

This elite space is cordoned off from the rest of the restaurant, which is elsewhere strewn with tables painted in bright primary-school colors, and looked down upon by artworks of various sorts: a Phillip Guston painting of his wife Musa here, a Cindy Sherman photograph of a panicked girl there. A Louise Bourgeois spider guides you down to the toilets.